> Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously was a slur then too.

It doesn't seem to say this - there's quite a nuanced discussion about whether or not it was a slur during that time period[1]:

> The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting..

> Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, before later being adopted by Europeans and becoming a generic label for all Native Americans....

> In the debate over the meaning of the word "redskin", team supporters frequently cite a paper by Ives Goddard, a Smithsonian Institution senior linguist and curator emeritus, who asserts that the term was a direct translation of words used by Native Americans to refer to themselves and was benign in its original meaning ...

> Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.

I think your summary saying the "status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear" is fair, but I think the Wikipeida article outlines that lack of clarity too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...

Like I said, this was a few years ago. Since the controversy is basically over, the article has normalized somewhat. Fwiw, the current article still says:

> A controversial etymological claim is that the term emerged from the practice of paying a bounty for Indians, and that "redskin" refers to the bloody scalp of Native Americans.[55] Although official documents do not use the word in this way, a historical association between the use of "redskin" and the paying of bounties can be made. In 1863, a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth."[56]

This is all WP:UNDUE. The claim is not just contoversial, it's downright nonsensical, unless you also believe "Indian" is a racial slur.